Hayden White defines
thehistorical workas
a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that classifies
past structures and processes in order to explain what they were by representing
them as models.

A historian takes events
that have happened and makes a story out of them.

Chronicle --» narrative prose discourse

A historian doesn't just find history
but also makes it by

arranging events
in a certain order

answering questions:
what happened? when? how? why?

deciding which events
in the chronicle to include and exclude

stressing some events
and subordinating others

A historian answers questions by three
different types of explanations:

Emplotment

Argument

Ideological implication

For each of these three explanations,
there are four types of forms from which the historian can choose :

Emplotment --
"every
history, even the most 'synchronic' of them, will be emplotted in some
way"

The four types of emplotment are romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy.

Romance =
drama of self-identification, including a hero's triumph over evil

Satire =
the opposite of romance -- people are captives in the world until they
die

Comedy =
harmony between the natural and the social; causes for celebration

Tragedy =
a hero, through a fall or test, learns through resignation to work within
the limitations of the world, and the audience learns as well

Romance and comedy typically represent
forms emerging in the world; satire and tragedy the return of the same
forms in a different situation

Argument =
the
historian's view of what history ought to
be

The four types of argument are formalist, organicist, mechanistic, and
contextualist.

Contextualism =
events explained by their relationships to similar events; traces threads
back to origins

Ideology:
reflects ethics and assumptions the historian has about life, how past
events effect the present, and how we ought to act in the present; claims
the authority of "science" or "realism"

(There were ideologies
which didn't claim science as an authority before the Enlightenment; they
are authoritarian. According to White, there is no possibility of
authoritarian ideology now.)

Conservative =
history evolves; we can hope for utopia, but change occurs slowly as part
of the natural rhythm

Liberal =
progression of social hisotry is the result of changes in law and government

Radical =
utopia is imminent and must be effected by revolutionary means

Anarchist=
the state is corrupt and therefore it must be destroyed and a new community
must be started

The historian also "prefigures"
the act of writing history by writing within a particular trope, one of
four deep poetic structures: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and
irony.

"[Tropes] are especially useful
for understanding the operations by which the contents of experience which
resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be prefiguratively
grasped and prepared for conscious apprehension." (White, 34)

metaphor = means "transfer"-- one phenomena
is compared or contrasted to another in the manner of analogy or simile

synecdoche = use a part of something
to symbolize the quality of the whole; for example, "He is all heart"

metonymy = substitution of the name
of a thing for the whole, eg., "sail" for "ship"

Metaphor is representational,
metonymy is reductionist, synecdoche is integrative, and irony is negational.

This is not as confusing as it
seems. White has broken down each of
the four modes into four categories. All we have to do is fill in
the slots when we want to determine the structure of a particular history.

emplotment

argument

ideology

poetic structure

romantic

formist

anarchist

synecdoche

tragic

mechanistic

radical

metaphor

comic

organicist

conservative

metonymy

satirical

contextualist

liberal

irony

These are the most common
combinations among the modes (excluding the poetic structure). However,
mixture among elements is what provides "dialectical tension," which is
part of the work of master historians.

The above information is taken
from Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Now, let's go
for a test run, trying to figure out a particular historian's historiographical
style. This is an interesting method to use to determine the differences
between the method of telling a history in a movie as opposed to a written
text. For example, I have graphed Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion
(1544) and the film Cabeza
de Vaca (1991) based on it like this:

Relacion

Cabeza de Vaca

Emplotment

Romance

Satire

Argument

Formal

Organicist

Ideology

(No modern category)

Liberal / Radical

Poetic Structure

Metaphorical

Synecdoche

Emplotment: I have chosen romance for Relacion
because Cabeza de Vaca relates in this history the unfolding of a new self
in relation to the Native Americans and his emergence back into his own
nation. I think that the film is a satire in comparison, because
its focus is on the vindictiveness of the Spaniards at the end. It
seems no matter what Cabeza de Vaca has learned, it will make no difference
in the scheme of things.

Argument: I think the argument for Relacion is formal
because of the nearly obsessive remembrance of particular objects-- for
instance, the focus on prickly pears or whatever was available to eat and
the nature of the variety of tribes he met. In contrast, I
think that the film focused on one part of the chronicle, the healings,
and consolidated the sum of his experience into this particular mamifestation
of power. The film is oriented toward the end goal of showing the
integration of de Vaca's Spanish character with the Native American
character.

Ideology: The ideology of the written history is based
on an authoritarian system. Cabeza de Vaca is reporting
to superiors on whom his future rests. However, the ideology of the
film is either liberal or radical. The end scene certainly
depicts an apocalyptic event, with the darkening of the sky and the silver
cross, and in this sense it might be considered radical. The process
of change in the "real" world, however, is not explicitly made imminent
but rather seems to be a result of a progression based on the laws of human
nature and extraordinary humans like Cabeza de Vaca.

Poetic Structure: I classified the poetic structure of
the written history as metaphorical because Cabeza de Vaca's mission
is analogical to the suffering Christ of the New Testament. Although
the movie could also be classified this way, I chose synecdoche
as more indicative of its style, since the qualities of the healer becomes
the whole tenor of the discourse.

Assignment

Believe it or not,
Hayden White's major thrust is that historical style can be explicated,
just like a poem. This is why he calls the writing of history a poetic
act.

Make a table like
the one above for the movie Pocahontas
and selections from John Smith's General History, the historical
basis for her story. Provide short justifications for each of your
choices. Remember, there may not be one right answer for some of
the categories. Rather, your particular reading of the structure
of the historical texts, including especially the differences between them,
is an important key to discussion about them. Often, we think about
the structure without being aware of it. So, let's make each other
aware, and then let's discuss the significance of our findings.